faulty A1000 controller- should I care?

Hi,

I have an A1000 RAID unit which has worked fine for years, and the disk
space is still there and it's chugging along fine. The Raid Mgr
software is reporting the controller as "unknown" and the diagnostics
report a faulty controller and the amber light on the back is solidly
lit. I have had no problems adding more space to the soft partition as
I gather from what I read actually accessing the space is not affected.

One of my disks is showing an amber light on the front, and I have not
had any problems because when I set this thing up several years ago
there was a hot spare configured with the last disk.

Anyway, if I were to get another disk and replace the bad one, would
the lack of this controller being active present a problem with it
putting the new disk into service? (rebuilding the RAID?) What
exactly is the controller used for? Would the new disk simply be the
new hot spare? Surely it must be something important? I'm sure I can
get a replacement part but I am trying to understand exactly how this
affects me.

I am going to read up further but I guess I was looking for a quick
answer from someone who may have dealt with something similar in the
past and not mind sharing the experience and/or insight. Thanks.


--Tom

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Have you booted from SRC/P RAID?
    ... You're thinking of a completey different kind of RAID configuration. ... The SRC/P is a SCSI-RAID controller card that inserts into a PCI slot ... whether it's a physical disk or a logical disk, ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)
  • Re: Installing Adaptec 1420SA SATA RAID controller
    ... neither disk nor RAID array. ... What about returning the Adaptec controller and replacing it with some ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • slackware 9.1 software raid problem
    ... Setting up a RAID system with Slackware 8 is not extremely difficult once ... mirroring the root partition and booting from that mirror was not possible. ... Each disk is attached to a different IDE chain on the motherboard. ... The ability to boot from the Slackware 8 install CD. ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: New SATA hard drive not being detected
    ... powering on the PC (or doing a warm boot). ... Another possible problem is that the SATA controller may also be a RAID ... partition and format the disk. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • RE: ASR Restore (XP Install) fails to recognize RAID driver
    ... > tolerance confirm RAID 0, ... > disk confirms hardware RAID, ... We used motherboard diagnostics and used the RAID controller BIOS to ... We ran disk diagnostics on each of the two drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)